Brad Feld

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Saturday Morning Reading

Jan 03, 2009
Category Books

It’s 2009, people are getting ready to get back in gear, and there’s a lot of good stuff floating around the blogosphere this morning.  Here’s some of it.

Economic Recovery Plan: Philip Greenspun has some prescriptive ideas about what the US needs to do to dig itself out of the ditch.  I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it, but it’s all stimulating.

Another Resume Tip: Whenever there is a downturn, the number of resumes that flow through my inbox increases dramatically.  Many of the companies we’ve invested in, including most of the Foundry Group investments, are growing so I’m happy to get these.  If you are a software developer, Joel Spolsky has a superb suggestion about how to shape your resume so I’ll pay attention.

Putting The Band Back Together: Fred Wilson has a nice post where he hypothesizes that when times are tougher, serial entrepreneurs tend to swarm together around the best opportunities.  The music metaphor of “putting the band back together” applies nicely.  Fred’s got some good hints about how to think about equity in these situations.  We are seeing this regularly also – one of our recent seed investments and another that we are closing early in January are cases of “getting the band back together.”

Google, why are you tracking links in my Gmail message? I’m not sure I care about this, but Dave Taylor does and I know that a bunch of other people, especially those of you that haven’t given up on your privacy, probably do.  It’s an interesting issue.

Why Government Investment in Broadband Is Justified Now: I hope one of the legacies of Obama is a real national broadband infrastructure in the US that is better than anywhere else in the world.  So does Tom Evslin; he has some good suggestions around it.

The $100 Fund: The crazy cats at VC Wear are giving away $100 in t-shirts for the stupid Twitter apps you can come up with.

My Holiday Project: A Twitter Search Engine Built on Windows Azure: Dare Obasanjo isn’t going to win a t-shirt from VC Wear for this one.  He explains his experience building a cloud based app for Twitter on Microsoft Windows Azure.

Burnout: Jon Fox of Automattic / Intense Debate realizes he was burned out and does something about it.  Are you burned out?  I hope you aren’t anymore and did something like what Jon did over the holiday break to recharge.

TechStars Meetups soon in NYC, Boston, Boulder, Paris, and more all the time: TechStars 2009 is starting to get rolling.  There are lots of pre-application meetups happening – follow the TechStars Meetups page if you are interested.

It’s too windy and cold to run outside today so I think I’ll go do my 1:45 run on the treadmill while watching The Matrix.  I always take the red pill.